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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577184">Astrologies, Animalism and Axioms</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kusuriurikun/pseuds/kusuriurikun'>kusuriurikun</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Shibuya Continuum [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ancient History, Astrology, Astronomy, Be forewarned I let Sho say fuck in my fics, Character Study, Finding your own axioms in life, Gen, Inner Dialogue, Literal Trash Heap Imagery, Math and Science Metaphors, Mathematics, Meditation, Tower of Babel, Tropical Storms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:41:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,047</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577184</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kusuriurikun/pseuds/kusuriurikun</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it's not a matter of trying to force a square peg in a round hole.</p><p>Sometimes it's finding a new system of mathematics and variables to actually arrive at your desired solution.</p><p>Due to the extensive mathematical and esoteric references, appendix and author's notes included at the end.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hanekoma Sanae &amp; Minamimoto Sho, Minamimoto Sho &amp; Reaper Officers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Shibuya Continuum [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902298</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Astrologies, Animalism and Axioms (main)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Sho is on his memory heap.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>More precisely, as is all too common late at night, Sho is </span>
  <em>
    <span>asleep</span>
  </em>
  <span> on his pile of wired-together detritus he affectionately terms a memory heap, on a tatami mat he has dug out of Gods only knows where.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In theory (in </span>
  <em>
    <span>theory</span>
  </em>
  <span>) he has crash space much like the other officers do, a small apartment near the Dead God’s Pad that he does use to clean up and to occasionally stash things that don’t have a Place yet in the heap...but Sho prefers it out here, on his pile of trash as King Shit of Fuck Mountain.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Inside is too stuffy, too limiting.  Here it’s free.  </span>
  <em>
    <span>He’s</span>
  </em>
  <span> free.  And while he’ll go into his pad to wash up or when it’s really bad out...he much prefers the Memory Heap as his own domain.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>If he gets up early enough, or stays up late enough--when the lights of Shibuya go down to a dull roar at four in the morning (as the lights go down in the Real for the necessary maintenance, so they do in the Imaginary, as above so below and vice versa)...sometimes Sho can pick out the occasional star, the occasional planet, though he’d probably not be able to point out actual constellations.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Shibuya’s light never dimmed quite enough to </span>
  <em>
    <span>see</span>
  </em>
  <span> the constellations, and only the brightest lights could hope to show up even in the diminished glare.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho wishes he could somehow build things up to touch the stars, or at least know what it was like to see more of them.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Some days, sleeping under the occasional glint of a star that manages to compete with the glare of neon and LCD screens is not a thing; sometimes the stars aren’t out.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Occasionally it snows, and sometimes it rains, and more often than not Sho will actually stay out in the rain and even occasionally watch the lightning form little electric fractals across the sky.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At least once in Sho’s unlife he’s seen the very skies open and the wind come forth such that even he was forced to his apartment he never stayed in for long as the Shibuya River for once lives up to its name of being a </span>
  <em>
    <span>river</span>
  </em>
  <span> rather than a glorified drainage culvert.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>This</span>
  </em>
  <span>, he remembers, is true Beauty in its wildness and chaos and power; he hates that it has to end.  He gets a sense the river in flood was maybe how it actually was </span>
  <em>
    <span>meant</span>
  </em>
  <span> to be, before it was tamed and lined in concrete.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho finds himself vaguely growling under his breath when he thinks on just how much has been  put in a cage of concrete and steel and neon and dressed up in such a way that its natural depth never had a chance of being seen.  (Including, to whit, himself.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He remembers the night after that storm was one of the all too rare times there was little glare at all as the power was out, and as he collects things blown down he remembers actually seeing the stars among the clouds for one of the few times in his life.  Can actually see them against the moon.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho thinks to himself on how the world is garbage and he is garbage and that he wishes people could see the beauty within the trash if the factoring hectopascals would just stop with their own goddamned noise for five factoring minutes and notice what is </span>
  <em>
    <span>around</span>
  </em>
  <span> them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because he is getting </span>
  <em>
    <span>zetta fucking tired</span>
  </em>
  <span> of having to shout to make himself heard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next day, Sho finds an old megaphone that has been tossed aside, and futzes about with it, and actually finds it somehow still </span>
  <em>
    <span>works</span>
  </em>
  <span> after he gets the shorted battery out and finds another from a broken old worksite lamp that is in a different geological layer of the Memory Heap (a few feet above the old Daihatsu and the old steel cabinets from the office that got torn down and the old oven that was in the cafe that USED to be where Shadow Ramen is now, there’s the old street sign from when they closed off that motorway to expand Pork City and the stoplight he snagged from there, aaaand…yes, right </span>
  <em>
    <span>there</span>
  </em>
  <span>).</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The megaphone does </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>go into the Heap, but becomes a useful tool for now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>After all, the lion needs to actually be properly </span>
  <em>
    <span>loud</span>
  </em>
  <span> when he roars.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Sho occasionally muses to himself on how his personal set of variables is all too often defined on what particular sets he is </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>a part of as much as the ones he </span>
  <em>
    <span>is.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Even when he was alive, he never really fit in anywhere; once he was dead, he seemed to be defined by Drive and General What-the-Factor.  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The maths fascination (which became obsession, which became overt </span>
  <em>
    <span>stim</span>
  </em>
  <span>) earned him his own constellation of nicknames.  Pi-face.  Zetta-sama (once the kid showed he was good, </span>
  <em>
    <span>scary </span>
  </em>
  <span>fucking good, at getting dead kids Erased and getting the metrics up).  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’d managed to haul himself up into Officer rank in record time, especially once he realized the maths had </span>
  <em>
    <span>power</span>
  </em>
  <span> here in the UG that he’d been blissfully unaware of before his demise and Reaperhood.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The other Officers are happy to hang out in the apartments in the Pad, and seem to take to socializing and discussion (and inane discussions about wine, and clothes, and other zetta fucking dull </span>
  <em>
    <span>crap</span>
  </em>
  <span>) far more easily than him.  (If he heard Konishi drone on five more factoring minutes about strategies and mapping and Expected Metrics in “after-work” </span>
  <em>
    <span>meetings</span>
  </em>
  <span>, he was going to go out of his </span>
  <em>
    <span>skull</span>
  </em>
  <span> and start engaging in experiments in topological knotwork on the most effective way to shut the Iron Maiden up.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho? He just wants to Fuck Off, and find Zetta Interesting Things for the Memory Heap, and do some personal scouting-around at the fresh meat for the week, and be left the fuck alone to </span>
  <em>
    <span>do his personal algebra</span>
  </em>
  <span> whether it was griefing the latest bunch of dead kids or finding some new place to tag or literally dumpster-diving or just staring at this shamboling pile of garbage that called itself a city and was the Weird And Hip Place when he died and is slowly becoming a glorified shopping complex.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>(Someday, he’s going to figure out how to fix THAT last unbalanced equation.).</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Thankfully, he’s now gotten enough of a rep of being a bit of an Irrational Number that people are content to leave him space.  (At least Megs is, and Kariya was back in the Harriers.  Konishi...is more of an unsolved variable for now, and Higashizawa is an unproven variable and Insignificant and not likely to perturb his own calculations at the moment.)</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>He remembers when he first became a Reaper Officer years ago after fledging from the Harrier’s Nest, and remembers how--at one point--he is taught to call upon his own Noise, his own Imagination made Real in the Complex.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He never quite got the </span>
  <em>
    <span>intent</span>
  </em>
  <span> of the training, which (to whit) was “Meditate on the twelve guardians of the calendar and see what calls to you”.  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Meditation is a surprising amount of Fail for him as Sho’s mind goes all over the place like a bifurcation diagram at the </span>
  <em>
    <span>best</span>
  </em>
  <span> of times.  Trying to keep a mind that thirsts for knowledge (like nothing else) free of wandering thoughts is as impossible as bailing out the ocean with a teacup.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Megs insists (even at some point going on about some hectopascal calling himself the Lizard King or some shit), and at one point even says “try to imagine being at the center of everything”.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho (for once) doesn’t outright rebel, and that “think of yourself at the center of everything” bit actually </span>
  <em>
    <span>works</span>
  </em>
  <span>...though probably not quite in the way Megs intended.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And--to everyone’s surprise--Sho doesn’t get Rat or Tiger or Monkey or Dog or Wild Boar.  </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>As Sho focuses himself at the zero point of (0,0) and shifts his inward gaze to the imaginary, he gets something not in the list at all--more in line with the lions that would guard Western embassies in a simulacra of the komainu guarding temples.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>None of the calendar guardian animals call to him, but the lion very much </span>
  <em>
    <span>does, </span>
  </em>
  <span>and so he adds his own Noise-form of Leo Cantus to his ever-growing list of personal eccentricities that make his set.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Most others--as he finds out later--did their own shift by calling forth from within, on a more mystical level; Sho actually literally does his own math, shifting his own frame of reference from Real to Imaginary, from an X axis to a Y axis and the intersection thereof in a simple move of simply calculating the sine, the cosine, and the tangent of his own algebra..</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It works for him, even if it </span>
  <em>
    <span>is</span>
  </em>
  <span> decidedly </span>
  <em>
    <span>unconventional</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>It’s a bit of a surprise, and a bit of a revelation, to Sho when the eccentric barista-artist who speaks to him of vaguely treasonous knowledges points out a new axiomatic set, a new algebra, that actually does a </span>
  <em>
    <span>much</span>
  </em>
  <span> better job of overlapping of sets.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho’s of course learned about Eastern astrology and the five elements and esoterica on that end, although he’s never given it much thought--it’s meaningful for other people, sure, but it doesn’t work with his particular algebra, and asking him to channel forth Monkey via meditation is about as sensible for how he works as asking an onmyoji or an itinerant medicine-peddler to map out a Sierpinski triangle as a ward against ghost cats.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sanae Hanekoma gives him a new set of variables and axioms--an intro to Western astrology and how it fit in with maths and Ceremony.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sho learns of Sumer, and the first people who mapped the constellations--with a completely </span>
  <em>
    <span>different</span>
  </em>
  <span> set of guardians of the twelve months--and learns of the strange base system the Sumerians used--a base-60 system in combination with base-10 as a sub-base, and invented for mapping the very stars and their movements in an age before decimals--such that this is how Western time was counted, and degrees and minutes and seconds.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Hanekoma also notes how the Chinese independently invented a similar system but based on the procession of Jupiter rather than the sun, and at some point even introduces Sho to the concept of how both the ancients and the alchemists used this system to calculate sines and cosines and tangents.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>(This pretty much </span>
  <em>
    <span>instantly</span>
  </em>
  <span> puts the subject in the Special Interest category for him.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And one of the first things Sho notices is that </span>
  <em>
    <span>this </span>
  </em>
  <span>particular set of axiomatic expressions has </span>
  <em>
    <span>his</span>
  </em>
  <span> Beast, and has a whole system of axioms that fits much, much better in how he--and the way he interacts with things, interacts with the world...fits much more in forming an overlapping set.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And over a function of time, Sho and Mister H have a lovely bit of delving into maths and magick over macchiato, up until the Fractal Bastard tries to throw the game and Sho (in his part) has to actively work to derive his own function.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It is unsurprising--knowing Sho stands in a set outside the rational or cardinal numbers--that the sigil he draws for deriving his own algebraic function from the sea of infinite numbers upon his self-iteration is intensely personal, and calls upon the Western zodiac as its bounding box, and is marked in names and numbers in a language not his own, and his own mark made on it--his name in a writing system of a foreign land to the East, and a Beast of lands far to the West.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His own Beast, the one that (unlike even the Cat) never even </span>
  <em>
    <span>had</span>
  </em>
  <span> a place at the table of the gods, but will drop the very fucking moon to do so even as Newton’s fabled tree dropped a wormy apple.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Much like the Sumerians that Mister H taught him about, the first to build cities, and the Babylonians and Akkadians who kept the old books and language long after Sumer had passed...he’ll build his own heap to reach the heavens.  His own ziggurat of a Memory Heap.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And the Singing Lion will shake </span>
  <em>
    <span>everyone’s </span>
  </em>
  <span>heart with its roar.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Appendix: Author's notes and terminology</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Yes, kids, it’s the dreaded maths/philosophy section!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Sumerians actually </span>
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal">
    <span>did invent a sexigesimal system</span>
  </a>
  <span> (base 60, though it did use base-10 as a sub-base) for their own astronomy observations, and pretty much the modern Western zodiac system AND the modern DMS system of angle measurement; most of our modern Western zodiac actually </span>
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac#History">
    <span>derives from Babylon, likely via Sumer</span>
  </a>
  <span>, and came to modern times via Greek and Hebrew.  (Babylonians, of note, are also in part how we can </span>
  <em>
    <span>read</span>
  </em>
  <span> Sumerian; it was used as a liturgical language for many centuries after the fall of the Sumerians, much as Latin is used in the Catholic Church or Hebrew was used in Judaism before its revival as a living language, and fortunately dual-language texts survived.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And considering what is coming in the next few fics (where I go very into dark and left-hand-pathy and Tabooty things!) you </span>
  <em>
    <span>bet your ass</span>
  </em>
  <span> I’m putting in at least one reference to ziggurats and hidden Tower of  Babel references! :D</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The stuff re...aforementioned Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil really deserves its own dedicated info-dump at some point (which will be done, I swear!  I have plans for this!) but the Cliff’s Notes version for this note is this: There are </span>
  <em>
    <span>multiple</span>
  </em>
  <span> layers of references (from the extremely personal-to-Sho, to the zodiacal refs and mapping, to </span>
  <em>
    <span>pi</span>
  </em>
  <span> appearing multiple times in the thing, to references to OTHER mathematical constants including the rest of Euler’s Identity, and </span>
  <em>
    <span>all of these showing up at different layers of resolution and angles you turn that thing</span>
  </em>
  <span>...and so much of it would be </span>
  <em>
    <span>deeply</span>
  </em>
  <span> personal and Relevant to Sho that it’s probably not an exaggeration to say it’s his attempt at tagging </span>
  <em>
    <span>reality itself</span>
  </em>
  <span>.  <br/></span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The tropical storm vaguely referenced is </span>
  <em>
    <span>very </span>
  </em>
  <span>loosely based on </span>
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Kirogi_(2000)">
    <span>Typhoon Kirogi</span>
  </a>
  <span>, a storm that was most notable for causing flooding and power outages in Tokyo in 2000.  (My own headcanon is that pretty much all the Reapers we run into died years, and often decades ago; Sho in particular I see as having had his own Actual Death Experience sometime in the late 90s.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The commentary re “Shibuya’s turning into a shopping mall!” is actually based on a commentary on a (now functionally dead) pop genre called </span>
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya-kei">
    <span>Shibuya-kei</span>
  </a>
  <span>, which has a lot of strong jazz fusion elements; the comment is based on a quote from Momus (a British artist who was actually involved in the Shibuya-kei scene at its height) on </span>
  <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/03/10/music/momus-honors-musics-eccentrics-turpsycore/#.WJV-slUrJvw">
    <span>why the genre is dead</span>
  </a>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>The more I write at way too damn early in the morning on too little sleep because some story or another demands to be Written before I forget... the more I’m convinced Sho Minamimoto is coded as a sort of Contrary and a special type of one as well.  (Also a decidedly </span>
  <em>
    <span>left-hand-path</span>
  </em>
  <span> Contrary, especially towards the end of his story as we know it...but we’ll get into that in the next few fics, I promise.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Specifically I’d argue he not only fits a bit of a Sacred Contrary trope (of which there are multiple examples, mind--most of which I won’t go into at length as it’s not my cultural property to do so) but specifically one of a very </span>
  <em>
    <span>untamed </span>
  </em>
  <span>Contrary, one that pretty much throws out Convention and which is explicitly outside of the norm and somehow gains Power from this.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One of the few examples I’m actually comfortable talking about here is Monkey (yes, as in Sun Wukong), whom is pretty much a perfect example of what I’m talking about--actually <em>refuses</em> to be tame, is </span>
  <em>
    <span>incapable</span>
  </em>
  <span> of being Tame, and when people try it’ll only make him THAT much more incorrigible--and yet his own ambitions get him in a shitload of trouble, and also grant him power, which gets him into yet <em>more</em> trouble...but damnit, Monkey’s still gonna grab that peach and drink the wine of the Immortals and set himself up as the Sage Equal To Heaven, because </span>
  <em>
    <span>that’s just what Monkey fucking IS.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So you’ve got weird-ass Pi-Face who is pretty much the Reaper Exemplar of the one “art that is not quite conventional Art”, namely, mathematics (and, by extension, the sciences)--pretty much the one Art that has been both extremely religious AND extremely atheistic, the one Art that tends to get its own separate section of Bachelorate degrees in BS rather than BA listings.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You’ve got Zetta-sama who is literally pulling <em>serious</em> fucking power using something people consider mundane and nerdy, and who also pretty much </span>
  <em>
    <span>cannot play well with others at all</span>
  </em>
  <span> and is </span>
  <em>
    <span>canonically </span>
  </em>
  <span>(from comments by Kariya regarding his “art”, to Megumi Kitaniji noting to Konishi that Sho simply isn’t a “social animal” and letting him </span>
  <em>
    <span>fuck off from the meeting</span>
  </em>
  <span>, to Hanekoma’s Secret Reports!) considered such a force of uncontrollable chaotic energy that it would actually be considered a sign of something deeply fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>wrong</span>
  </em>
  <span> if he managed to actually be </span>
  <em>
    <span>predictable</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Oh yes, and it’s pretty strongly implied (well, from his own Noise form being </span>
  <em>
    <span>something entirely outside of Eastern astrology</span>
  </em>
  <span> and outright stated to be Taboo Noise in and of itself and Sho’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>left fucking hand</span>
  </em>
  <span>) that he’s probably been playing with stuff...well...outside the orthodox in OTHER manners, too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then there’s all the symbolism in the Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil itself, which is actually so extensive I’m going to have to write a dedicated Investigator’s Report Fanfic on just THAT ALONE.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yes, Sho Minamimoto is a perfect Contrary, a bit of a NOT set of his own, and...if we ever do see a sequel (a </span>
  <em>
    <span>The World Ends With Two</span>
  </em>
  <span> or a </span>
  <em>
    <span>The World Begins With You</span>
  </em>
  <span> or whatnot) as it so strongly seems that SQEX </span>
  <em>
    <span>wants </span>
  </em>
  <span>to do as of late...they could do worse than a bit of an arc inspired by old stories of a certain contrary being pulled out from a heap of rocks to serve as a zetta strong partner to a group on a very important journey.</span>
</p>
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